Woke is not dead yet

Critics of the woke policies that have eroded women’s rights, revived racial thinking and tyrannised the workplace have scored some notable victories lately. Most significant is the UK Supreme Court’s ruling that, where equality law is concerned, women are biological females. This came off the back of other legal judgements in favour of women’s sex-based rights, as well as the broader ‘vibe shift’ heralded by Donald Trump’s second presidency in the US.

In the corporate world, we have witnessed some rolling back of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), including a turn away from woke advertising. There has even been a blow for academic freedom. Last month, the Office for Students fined the University of Sussex for failing to uphold free speech, following the hounding of gender-critical professor Kathleen Stock back in 2021.

Each of these developments should be celebrated by fans of tolerance, equality and liberty. Some commentators are now even heralding the end of woke altogether. ‘Britain has finally overthrown the suffocating tyranny of the woke left’, says the Telegraph. ‘The woke movement is finally over’, claims the Spectator. Trump’s first days in office were described as ‘The week woke died’ in The Times.

It’s great that the woke authoritarianism of the Black Lives Matter and Stonewall era is being dialled down. It’s good that women in prison will hopefully no longer have to be incarcerated alongside male sex offenders, and that girls in Scottish schools can now have single-sex toilets. But we need a reality check. The end of woke? This is wishful thinking.

The political and cultural elites are not prepared to relinquish their guiding philosophy so readily. Within hours of the Supreme Court judgement on the definition of woman, Labour MPs took to WhatsApp to discuss how the ruling could be challenged. It took UK prime minister Keir Starmer almost a week to make any direct comment on the court’s decision in parliament. Even then, he welcomed the ‘legal clarification’ the ruling provided, rather than the blow it struck for women’s rights.

Nor will there be a great relinquishing of DEI more broadly. The vast majority of British bosses say they will not follow the lead of their American counterparts and scale back woke initiatives. Some multinational companies – like Barclays – have decided to scrap diversity targets in their US branches to placate Trump, but are refusing to do so here in the UK. In many workplaces, DEI will remain deeply entrenched for the foreseeable future. Just look at the NHS, which fell hard for gender ideology. In London, transgender patients can still access women-only spaces in all hospitals.

The dominance of woke thinking in our cultural institutions is firmly entrenched, too. In the aftermath of the Supreme Court ruling, the general secretary of Equity, the performing-arts union, announced that it will be ‘regrouping’ in order to ‘defend and advocate for trans artists’. When it comes to toilets, the Bristol Old Vic theatre has said it will defy the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s interpretation of the Supreme Court’s ruling and will allow people to ‘use the facilities that are most appropriate for them’.

Meanwhile, the BBC apparently plans to hold ‘listening sessions’ for transgender staff who fear ‘hostility’ in light of the Supreme Court judgement. Presumably, it has never once held listening sessions for women fearful of vilification for defending their sex-based rights.

It’s the same story in almost every aspect of our social and cultural life. At this weekend’s London marathon, transgender runners were allowed to compete as women in the non-elite category. Even the Girl Guides has said it will defy the Supreme Court and still allow teenage boys to sleep in girls’ dormitories and use girls’ toilets on camps. In museums and art galleries, universities and schools, identity-driven, reality-denying woke views still dominate.

To declare that woke is over is to fail to appreciate just how deep-rooted and all-consuming such ideas are among the UK’s cultural elite. Although the word ‘woke’ itself is relatively new, identity politics and a politically correct focus on language and representation developed over the course of many decades. Woke was never just a pose that could be readily dropped and replaced. This kind of thinking provided those running institutions with a sense of moral purpose and a way to manage staff and members of the public. This is why DEI in the workplace will be reinvented rather than rejected. Without diversity as a driving force, many in upper management would struggle to justify their own role.

The rejection of the Supreme Court’s judgement shows us how deeply woke thinking is entrenched in the UK. While the ruling may well force institutions to bring their policies in line with the law eventually, this falls short of the kind of cultural change that we need. Similarly, the fine doled out to the University of Sussex has prompted many higher-education bureaucrats to review their institutions’ policies on academic freedom. But this won’t create an intellectual climate that truly values free speech. Begrudging compliance is a poor substitute for genuine social change. Rowing back solely on the recent excesses of woke allows the underlying thinking that shaped wokeness to go unchallenged.

Reports of woke’s death have been greatly exaggerated. If we want to see off this ideology once and for all, we cannot rely on elite institutions to deal the fatal blow. As well as top-down legal rulings, we also need a bottom-up populist rejection of wokeness in all its forms.

Joanna Williams is a spiked columnist and author of How Woke Won. She is a visiting fellow at Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Hungary.